On the impossibility of correlating an objective criticism of art with a subjective appreciation

Although all great art is truly great in itself, only some of it is, at different times and for different people, like a key which fits a lock on a door we’ve never opened. As we obtain new rooms, so do we close off others behind us. This must be the key to my theory of milieu – the undetectable stream of living which resets our fundamental thought-processes and makes us approach the same task at different times with such subtly different tones.

Writing: show or tell?

Shena Mackay tells us a lot of information in her short stories. I was always of the opinion that ‘show, don’t tell’ means that you reveal information slowly through prompts, and that each prompt (for instance, a necklace or a car) should have only one corresponding reveal. Prompts should be separated from each other by the passage of some action in real time. That gives you a lean, sparse story that’s both economical and concentrated. Example:

A woman is walking to her car, sees a necklace in the road which reminds her of a necklace she lost when a child. Innocently bewildered by her reminiscence, she picks it up and continues to her car. Then the police arrest her for theft.

The ‘tell, don’t show’ version could run like this:

A woman in the back of a police car looks at the path she was walking on which reminds her of the necklace that reminds her of her childhood, which got her there in the first place.

If you can show how the summary looks grammatically tortuous, you can tell that the one is preferable to the other.

Why I hate the Glass Bead Game

Games are designed to stimulate the mind. Chess has proved a long-lasting, peaceful substitute to, and simulation of, the brutal necessities of war. Although a simulation, games possess an inner logic which means that they can also be a substitute for reality. Addiction to computer games is now treated in clinics. Whether virtual reality/ integration is a mere game or an ontology is yet to be posed, but will be once the technology is sophisticated enough.

The glass bead game is a game of extraordinary elegance and freedom. It is an abstract rubric in which players range across human cultural history for material they can use in their 'moves.' The game is a product of a future Europe which has reached the end of its useful productive cultural life. In this way, Das Glasperlenspiel shares the cultural pessimism of Oswald Spengler, but replaces Spengler's vision of a future in which 'Caesarism' triumphs over culture with a future in which monastic-scholastic contemplation triumphs over experience. Although we do not know to what extent this monasticism exists as a general phenomenon or a peculiarity of the province in which glass bead game players study and play, the book gives us this alternative vision as a political solution to Spengler's problem, which was playing itself out in WWII as Hesse wrote the novel.

I get the feeling from Das Glasperlenspiel of a writer who has utterly repudiated his age, but who wishes to situate within it a retreat which is serene and intellectual and Spartan, and as aloof as Lhasa before the coming of the Chinese. It was published in 1943, so the age that is repudiated is the Third Reich. However, Hesse does not rejoice in the freedom that would be gained in the wake of the curtailment of the thousand-year regime, but instead replaces the discipline meted out under the swastika with a different kind of discipline. In the novel, the Castalians are the disciplined acolytes of the Game. They do not get married; they do not experience desire; they are not even creative in the ordinary sense of that word. They are merely conscientious scholars of world culture. The glass bead game itself is played under conditions of total renunciation. The world outside the kingdom of Castalia is only raised as a political threat to their monkish way of life; never as a temptation (as in, for instance, Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation, as well as most other ‘ascetic’-type communities such as the Amish). Hesse would have us believe that no one would want to go out into the world outside once they have been introduced to the purity of the Game.

As a red-blooded young man, I doubt this, but then the crux of my argument is that such renunciation is bad. But what I don't doubt is that Hesse was ill in Nietzsche’s sense. He didn’t take the Judean route - rebellion, rabble-rousing against Rome (cf. Genealogy of Morals) - but the Buddhist one. Hesse wasn't a rebel; he was an ascetic.
Hesse was physically frail - he was rejected for combat duty in the Great War - a fact which must be borne in mind when reading this novel of intellectual dislocation and disembodiment and retreat. His reaction to war was to move away from Germany to Switzerland - after the Fatherland lost the Great War, as if protesting against militarism by protesting against the distinctly non-militarist Weimar Republic was a bold gesture. Twenty years later, his plan for facing off against the Nazi regime was exactly the same as his support for Weimar - to stay exactly where he was. In Switzerland. Hesse's 'politics of detachment' was the politics of extreme individualism: 'Every Buddhist for himself'. Contrasted with that other Nazi-'detachee' Ernst Jünger, it is difficult to respect Hesse. Jünger sought inner emigration in the Wehrmacht. Hesse in cuckoo land.

Jünger's preface to the 1929 English translation of In Stahlgewittern reads:

Time only strengthens my conviction that was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart.

Experience is hot-blooded, in its heights and its depths. Murder - but so too romantic love. War - but also the beauty of self-sacrifice. Hesse's glass bead game players are the apogee of selfish individualists turned away from the world into a private contemplation. What is worse is that the glassbead game players aim low: their contemplation is not of some mystical, difficult apogee of human existence - of God, for instance - but of something much more staid - high cultural history.

The full title of the novel should be: The Glassbead Game - the torpid spiritual life of academic fantasist Joseph Knecht.

Meddling medical men meld made-up memories to mice's minds, may make man-as-memory moot

Link here to a report on scientists introducing false memories in mice.

Of course, erasing memories for sufferers of PTSD is progress, but science is Promethean, and it would be remiss not to note the anxieties set out in Blade Runner/ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.  If personality is the sum of memories (bodily as well as intellectually, of course) then what could this mean for personality itself?

Fry up on bathetic British banknote bust-up; campaigners kick off, crow about Equality Act infraction

Utterly mental. Link here.Let's just stick abstract shapes on them and have done with it. Let's erase Darwin and Smith and Hublon in the name of equality (nod to Dostoevsky's Devils, there). They've emasculated and denationalised  the Euro, so why wouldn't the BoE do it with the pound? Just stick on some non-local shapes and let the equalisers have what they want.

Recession prompted 'unprecedented' fall in UK wages

At our brother blog, the Lord of Reward. Something for socialists to applaud and libertarians to deplore.

Link here.

The body is gone, but you can still smell her...

Thatcher was a 'conviction' politician, but her conviction was based on the error that everyone else was just like her, but lacked her willpower. She began as a middle-class grocer's daughter in the east Midlands and  worked her way up the social ladder by hard work, perseverance and luck, she became a research chemist who worked on whippy ice cream (a 99 = iced Thatcherism) and then a barrister as she forayed into politics.
'There is no such thing as society,' she later quipped, to the outrage of the communitarian left.

This was a woman of iron will who was well networked. She had middle class upbringing. She married a wealthy businessman. She conveniently forgot these elements as she worked through her philosophy of personal industry and force-fed it to the British public in the 1980s. To Thatcher, it was only a lack of willpower that prevented mining towns from recasting themselves as hubs of entrepreneurship. This is the logic of a well-connected and highly mobile woman.

The Conservatives were voted in in '79 much the same way they were (albeit with the Liberals) in 2010 - on a promise to sort out the economy. And sort it out they did, as the hagiographers keep telling us. Catastrophic unbalancing of the economy would be another way of putting it. Scrapping industry because we can't compete with the Germans is nothing to be lauded. What filled the gap was the beginning of the pain: 1986's Big Bang, which revivified the City of London, helped keep the GDP figures handsome:

Unfortunately, it also provided a crack pipe for Westminster to smoke itself into the belief that there would be 'no return to boom and bust'. A 'shot in the arm', as the Americans would say, which kills the legs is no cure at all.

Thatcher's death gives us a glimpse of what is interesting in people's attitudes towards society. That she 'had to take on the unions', 'sort out the national debt', 'get inflation down' possesses the status of myth for the winners of Thatcher's policies. For the losers - those whom Thatcher believed lacked the willpower to be a part of her Britain - there was increasing meaninglessness, increasing poverty and increasing shame: in the North, Midlands and the West; in Scotland; in Wales; in Northern Ireland.

Thatcherism, for all its divisiveness, gave way to something much worse: Blairism. Blairism shared Thatcherism's credo of greed (they were intensely comfortable with people getting filthy rich), ramped up surveillance, tried to re-engineer the ethnic make-up of the country in a spectacular piece of gerrymandering the demos, but went to war dishonestly with Iraq, and then laughed off what was basically a war crime. Thatcher was an arrogant prig. Blair an insufferable eel.

Thatcher is dead, but her legacy is alive.